Charles River Analytics Developing Innovative Cyber Capabilities for the Air Force

Charles River Analytics, a developer of intelligent systems solutions, announces two contracts developing innovative cyber capabilities for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC). AFLCMC is assessing technologies for use in a cyber Air Operations Center (AOC) and awarded Charles River with two contracts: one for Probabilistic Relational Models for Cyber Situation Awareness (PRM4Cyber) and another for an Advanced Pattern Recognition (APR) system for the cyber domain. Charles River is teaming with PatchPlus Consulting on both efforts.

In the PRM4Cyber project, Charles River is addressing challenges the Air Force faces when trying to quickly detect and respond to cyber attacks, crucial activities in today’s military environment. Charles River is applying probabilistic relational models (PRMs) – an emerging technology that models a situation as a set of objects and the relationships between them – to cyber situation awareness, which provides an understanding of current cyber activities and the environment.

Dr. Avi Pfeffer, Principal Scientist at Charles River, said, “PRM4Cyber will help the Air Force assess the applicability of PRM technology for providing effective and rapid cyber situation awareness.”

In the APR project, Charles River is tailoring and applying an Advanced Pattern Recognition (APR) system to the cyber domain. Mr. Curt Wu, Chief Software Engineer at Charles River, said, “APR will help the Air Force assess how effectively several APR algorithms can detect computer network attacks.” Because each algorithm has different capabilities and strengths, the APR system integrates them into a common framework to provide comprehensive coverage of a wide range of attack behaviors that occur in the cyber domain.